


Safety

by eerian_sadow



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, Other, Turks - Freeform, friendship fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-14
Updated: 2007-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-17 19:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/180323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eerian_sadow/pseuds/eerian_sadow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trust isn’t only about knowing someone has your back on the battlefield.  Sometimes it was in the aftermath too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safety

**Author's Note:**

> written for the livejournal community springkink, for the prompt: Final Fantasy VII, Tseng/Elena/Reno/Rude: Trust - "Being safe sure as hell wasn't in the job description, but times like these made up for it.'

  
He had taken some beatings in his time. They all had. But this most recent one was definitely the worst.

And the worst part was that he couldn’t even remember how he’d gotten it. His memory blanked out after leaving the office last night.

Leaving alone. Stupid.

He hurt. Everywhere. If hurt could be an actual physical presence, it was laying in this uncomfortable hospital bed with him.

He groaned.

“Rude? Are you awake?”

He blinked open brown eyes, then immediately shut them again at the harshness of the light.

“Reno, get the lights.” Elena. It was Elena beside him, watching over him.

She might have had her blond moments, but knowing that she was there made him feel a bit safer.

“You bet.” Reno’s voice, then an audible click. “Lights are dead. How you feelin’ man?”

He opened his eyes again and watched his partner walk to his bedside. “Like I was beaten down by Sephiroth.”

Elena flinched at the statement, having some similar personal knowledge of just how that felt. Of course, she remembered the experience and would carry that scar to her grave. He reached out to take her hand, despite how the IV pulled in the vein when he did so. The blond woman let him, drawing comfort from his touch.

He was pretty sure that Kadaj and his brothers had done more to Elena than just torturing her, but she would never say.

“There were four of them by the time we all came outside,” Reno told him. The red head settled carefully onto the bed next to him, laying a gentle hand on his stomach. That simple gesture told him how much his sometimes-lover had worried over him. “Rufus shot one of them and we beat the others down. Tseng is questioning them right now.”

That was Turk-speak for “making them hurt as much as they hurt you.” He understood; he, Reno and Elena had done the same when they thought AVALANCHE had killed Tseng.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

Elena answered. “Four broken ribs, three broken fingers, left leg broken in three places, ruptured spleen, ruptured kidney, collapsed lung and your heart stopped twice. We though we were going to lose you.”

He tightened his hand on hers. “I’m still here.”

“Yeah, but it was a close thing.” Reno placed his head carefully on his chest. It hurt, but the comfort he derived from it was more important. “A Cure took care of all the broken bones, but the rest just didn’t want to heal.”

“We think they used a spell.” The trio looked to the doorway as Tseng came in. “Nothing else short of Hojo would explain why the doctor’s healing abilities were not working.”

There was a short silence of understanding between the members of the team. The thought of unknown harmful magic was bad, but the memories of Hojo were worse. That was one lunatic they were well and truly glad to be rid of.

Tseng settled himself onto the rail at the foot of the bed. “They claim to have beaten you because of your skin tone. It likely would have been me or Elena in this bed right now, if one of us had come outside first.”

He took the backhanded comfort that the statement offered. Yes, he had likely been targeted because he was a Turk, but he was still a minority figure. He had been singled out because someone was prejudiced. Had Reno walked out the door first, he probably would have just gotten in the car and gone back to his apartment. It wasn’t personal, not really.

If Rufus didn’t kill the bastards now that Tseng was done with them, he would do it himself.

A nurse came into the room then. “I have to give him his pain killers now. You three should probably go.”

Had they been civilians, the woman would have simply ordered them out. But the general public had learned long ago that you didn’t argue with someone in one of those nicely tailored black or blue suits.

“No,” Tseng told her firmly. “The Turks take care of their own. After this, we would never leave him alone and drugged.”

“Fine,” the nurse replied. “But the redhead needs to get off the patient.”

Reno smiled sheepishly, but sat up. He missed his partner’s warmth on his chest.

The nurse moved behind Elena and injected something into the IV. He knew that he would be feeling its affects in a few minutes.

“It’ll probably make you fall asleep again,” the nurse told him. “If you all need anything, the call button is on the table.”

They watched the woman leave the room, grateful that the stranger hadn’t tried to force them apart. Too much had happened to them over the last several years to ever allow unwilling separation again. When she was gone, Reno settled back onto his chest.

“Don’t be afraid to sleep, Rude. We have your back.” Tseng’s words were spoken in his usual cultured tone, but he could feel the truth behind them. His team leader wouldn’t let anything else happen to him while he couldn’t defend himself.

With a slight smile at Reno and Elena, he closed his eyes. Normally, he wouldn’t let his guard down like this when he was hurt, but he knew that he could trust his teammates with his life.

They gave him the kind of safety that his job could never promise.

But then, safety had never been in the job description. Moments like this—even though he was drugged and in pain—made all of that worth it.

“Get me coffee when I wake up?”

He could feel Elena’s smile at the question. “I’ll have Cloud deliver it from that place near the bar that you like.”

He smiled as the drugs made him drift off to sleep. Yes, moments of understanding like that made the job entirely worth it.  



End file.
